March 30th, 2006

Yippppeeeee!!! im going to Bangalore again :D. Bangalore is 1 place that i love like hell. Love ‘cos of the cool weather and hell ‘cos of the traffic. Moyeen, Reza, Siva and myself are going to take part in the MEDC (Mobile and Embedded Developer Conference) 2006. And you know what, my college is sponsoring the cost of the conference 😀 :D. Myself and Moyeen approached the college Directors along with our project guide Mr.Thiagarajan. We told him that our project was based on advanced mobile devices 😉 and attending this conference would be very useful. On hearing that, he immediately agreed to sponsor us.

The Directors showed interest in our project and told us to move the project to a dedicated server :). We are very grateful to them for sponsoring the conference and ofcourse our project guide who took all the steps to ensure that we got the sponsorship.

BarcampThe BarCamp Chennai organisers meet is scheduled to happen this saturday (1-APR-2006); not a april fool joke 😉 at Anna University at 12pm. If you are interested in knowing whats really happening, do drop in. We would love to have you there

HOL @ RMK – .NET Bash Live!The Microsoft Student Partners of Chennai are conducting .Net Bash Live! at RMK Engg. College on 2nd April 2006 (sunday) from 9am to 3pm. .NET Bash Live! is the new name for Hands-on-Lab sessions conducted by us for the community. If you are interested in having one at your college, contact me at aswin [dot] net [at] gmail [dot] com. My landline number is 24853416 (or) contact Krishnaa at gkrishnaa [at] gmail [dot] com. His mobile number is 9841190039. If i’m not available plz leave your contact details so that i can get back to you. Many more colleges are joining in the bandwagon and its all happening very fast 😀

We have also started planning for a mega event on the 1st week of May; like the Date with .NET, except that this will be a full day event with lot of fun, demos of Vista Beta and Office 2007 and lots of technical sessions by professionals from the industry. Will post more details about it as and when we are fully into it.

Coming back, MEDC 2006 will be great experience and i will be getting to meet new friends and student partners of Bangalore again. Its lot of fun to be with them 😀 Looking forward to the trip. See you all soon.

March 26th, 2006

Aha!! finally, we have got a fine working demo of our project. Thanks to Moyeen and Sathya, who were working very well and very co-operative. We have uploaded it to an asp.net server and after testing it, we will provide the url which you can use to try out our project.

Working on the project was very exciting because it was not a paid project and it was team work. We developed every module from the scratch and encountered lots of problems, which were cleared ASAP, giving us more experience in the technology. As Kiruba says, “I like teamwork and i like winning too“. Thanks for the sentence Kiruba, it works here also 😀

And hey, those of you who don’t know what the project is, its an Email Client for Mobile Devices. We have the 3rd review for the project on 28th of this month and we should be doing fine for it.

March 21st, 2006

Hey friends!! last sunday and monday (yesterday n day before yesterday) was so good as usual. 2006 proved to be a great year for me yet again. I became a member of the barcamp organisers group and was called in for a meeting with Kiruba and his barcamp friends. It was too good to be a part of the planning for a big informal tech event. All of them were damn cool and everything (atleast most of it) was discussed openly. Its there on the wiki too. If you are interested to join us, subscribe yourself to the organize_barcamp google group and be a part.

We are also looking for sponsors for the event. If you know anyone, kindly email me at “aswin [dot] barcamp [at] gmail [dot] com“, or if you like to take up some other activity, don’t hesitate to drop a mail.

Yesterday was really cool as 6 of us (Bala, Chitresh, Krishnaa, Prathul, Siva and myself) went to St.Josephs Engg. College in Chennai for giving introductory sessions on .net. Bala started with showing the demo of codeless tabbed notepad and then proceeded to discuss about language independency of .net. Krishnaa showed off the new features of Office 2007. Though its still in beta and a bit buggy, its a phenomenal improvement. You have to see to believe all sorts of things that are possible in Office 2007. See a video here.

After the awesome lunch, we continued with Siva doing ASP.NET. He developed a full fledged codeless website, in which different types of users can login and based on the permissions per user, certain pages will be shown and others are inaccessible. My session was on Web Services and how one can develop a web service using C# and consume it in java using Netbeans. More details about it on my tech blog.

St.Josephs college has a nice auditorium and everything required was made available for us. Things went perfectly on schedule and we wrapped with the usual quiz (Prathul and Chitresh were the quiz masters 😉 ), giving Visual Studio Express cds. Thanks to Saurabh, Aswin R (3rd year IT) of St.Josephs and their team who organised this small event.

March 16th, 2006

hello all,

Since most people these days are IT professionals or in related fields, you must have surely heard of the term FOO-BAR. In relation to this “BAR”, there is a BarCamp that is going to happen in our city on April 8th and 9th.

Basically, its an unconference wherein every participant has to give presentations and take part in organising the event.

March 12th, 2006

Today was a great day, The Echo Club members (we), about 20 of them spent time with children of an orphanage named Karunai Illam. This home is located in Madambakkam, about 5 Km from Raja Kilpakkam, near Tambaram. Before i continue, let me give a hearty hug to Mrs. Amritha Rajagopalan, a very famous social worker who is one of the supporters for the home and the doctors, Dr. Jayachandran and Dr.Mrs.Parveen who took all the pain to come to the place and serve the children. Mr. Power Singam, who runs the home, had everything in place when we arrived.

It was certainly awesome fun being with the children, their max age being 12. When Mrs. Amritha arrived at the home, the children greeted her unanimously saying, “Good Morning! Aunty“. She became very happy at such a enthusiastic response. We arranged for a free medical camp. Things rolled well and we were on schedule. We reached the place by 8.30AM. The medical checkup started by 9.30AM. Dr. Jayachandran started by addressing the small gathering of students by telling them a story. Every single child listened with utmost patience and it was pin-drop silence when the doctor was talking (something that we college guys should learn). Every child was bubbling with enthusiam. It was a pleasure !!

Medical ExaminationAll the boys were examined by Dr. Jayachandran and girls by Dr. Mrs. Parveen. The checkup began by stripping the boys naked. One of us measured the height, another one weighed the kid and then was sent to the doctor. Some kids got so shy that they started doing brake dance ha ha! It was funny. All the children were physically very fit. Thanks to Mr.Power Singam who is running the home. The children are provided good food.

As the doc was examining the children, he was telling some medical terms that needed to be recorded.

1. CVS RS NAD (Cardio Vascular System, Respiratory System – No Abnormality Detected)2. Genitals NAD3. Liver Spleen Normal4. Tonsils (+) – for those who had tonsils5. Ears NAD or Ear wax or Ear fungus (if they needed to be cleaned)6. Spine normal7. Tooth normal or Tooth Cavity (+) and the no. of teeth that had cavity

Some children (about 3 or 4) had a small swelling on their neck, for which they needed to be tested for Primary Complex. Some other children who were hard of hearing due to ear wax or ear fungus needed to be taken to ENT specialists. Everyone was given Zentel (1 tab), Trifer syrup (iron tonic), MVTs (Multi Vitamin Tablets) and Vitamin A tablets.

We learnt how to recognise tonsils, abnormalities in the male genitalia, vitamin A deficiency, B-complex deficiency, abnormalities in spinal cord, liver and spleen abnormalities and problems in ear, tooth and nose. It was a very good experience by becoming doctors for 2 hours ;), an opportunity that can’t be missed for a lifetime :D.

One of the symptoms of Vitamin A deficiency was rashes on the elbow, just above the joint. For B-complex deficiency, there would be miniature wounds on the edges of lips, that look like rashes. Those who look very dull or their bottom eyelid is pale white or pale pink, they have iron deficiency. Of the 86 children that were examined, only about 1% of them had some deficiencies. Rest of them are 100% normal and very healthy. Every child was advised to take half tea spoon of Trifer syrup and dates (they have high iron content) for normal iron in the blood. They were advised to drink a lot of milk, a tea spoon of butter and vitamin A tablets daily so that there would be no vitamin A deficiency. Vitamin A deficiency is 1 of the major problems faced in our country. Even though 99% of them were completely normal and since most of them are aged below 12, they were advised for daily intake of dates and butter so that they would grow into super healthy humans 😀 😀

We played with themAs the camp was going on, a small crowd began forming around the tables where the doctors were seated. They were the children for whom the checkup was over and they wanted to understand what was going on. So, 5 of us engaged them by taking them over to a nearby ground, forming teams of 6 each and played cricket for the next hour.

Those kids taught us the long forgotten street game of Goli :). Ismail and Abdul did a really cool job of calling groups of children in turn to clear their doubts of what was going on in the camp. Many of them came to ask us vidu-kadhais. We even took small group photos. This excited them very much and they crowded around the digital camera to see their faces :). Prashant was patiently explaining how the cam worked, and they did listen to him. Good job dude!

Encounter with a SnakeWe had two digital cameras whose silly batteries kept running out. So myself and Arun decided to go to Tambaram to buy duracel batteries. I was riding Abdul’s pulsar (150 cc). On the way back, the roads were free and i was going at a speed of 70 kmph. About 100 m ahead of me, a TVS 50 biker was wiggling with his bike. I was wondering what he was doing in the middle of the road and within a second, i was just 10 m behind him.

A huge snake was lying along the width of the road with its raised hood. I was terrified at such a sight. I was going at 70kmph. Stopping the bike suddenly spelled danger of skidding as the road was a bit sandy. I also had the fear of the snake striking me. Closing my eyes and raising my legs, i let “eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee !!” and ran over the snake !! Without even pausing to see what happened to the snake, i turned the bend at 70 kmph, something that i had never done before. A few minutes later, i was back at Karunai Illam.

Hopefully, the snake shouldn’t have died.

Lunch at the IllamThe medical camp was over by now. We thanked the doctors, gave them a small gift and they left with their heart and soul very contented. They rang a bell to signal lunch. All the children stood in queue with their plates to get the lunch. They stood in height order with no pushing or pulling and shouting. They behaved very decently. After getting their food, they settled with a glass of water at their table. What surprised me was, even the smallest kid hadn’t spilled a bit of food on the floor. They were very clean.

We also had our lunch along with them. After the lunch, we looked thro’ the prescriptions that the doctors had given us, split the tablets for each of them and gave them to Mr.Singam so that he can give them to the kids.

We took a big family photo with the kids and left Karunai Illam by 3pm. It was a very nice heart-warming experience today.

TeamHere is the list of people who made it to Karunai Illam. Aarthi Sarma, Abdul, Anusha, Arun, Balaji B, Dilli Boy (actually she is a girl 😉 ), Ismail, Mangai, Nachal, Prasanth, Rajeev, Saranya Ranganathan, Senthil, Sriram Nishwanth, Uma and myself. If you had seen clearly, half of the team were girls. A wake up call to all the hyper-conservative dads !!

On the whole, it is NOT a great job done by great people, it is a small deed done by ordinary people to make this world a better place to live in.

March 10th, 2006

It says there are improvements in UI too; and during the Sun Tech Days, they told that support was being added for Vista UI too. Let us see how the UI displays in Vista. Will post more about the UI later in the day. By the way, i have uploaded some vista pictures from my very own installation of Windows Vista :D. See them.

March 8th, 2006

Hi! all, im just back from the Andhra trip. All the days were fun and personally i made some good friends during this trip. And all those guys have the same mind set as im. I had to leave on 25th morning by Brindavan to Bangalore where we had to meet the Bangalore champs to go that evening to Hyderabad. It was a rejoiceful meet. This time, we had a new person in our team named Nirmal, who had nicknames such as AbNirmal, Psychic etc…

That nice after a very very late dinner at a good place, we left to hyderabad.

[26th Feb 2006]Reached hyderabad at about 12 pm and had breakfast. We met 3 hyderabad champs who had lunch with us at 4.30 pm ;), after which we left for Microsoft IDC (India Development Center) at HiTech City. The whole city of hyderabad is superb. The roads are excellent. Most of the roads are of 8 lanes or 6 lanes. Imagine the traffic going at an awesome speed of 80kmph. You can never imagine that in chennai and in bangalore if you are able to cross 20kmph, you are God!

We were glad to meet the hyderabad ADE (Academic Developer Evangelist) Prathiba and her champs 😉 at the IDC. After a brief meeting about the bandwagon, we chennaites were on a tour of the IDC. There are 2 huge buildings and a sprawling green lawn that will hold your eyes for hours together. Its beautiful :D. The lawn also extends to a cricket ground, basket ball ground and many other outdoor games. The office building we visited is where actual development of Microsoft softwares takes place. Every floor has a pantry, where you get all types of cool and hot drinks (for free !!). There are also libraries (obviously) and places where you can play snooker, table tennis (my favourite), carrom, chess etc. Infact, more than place for work, its a place for enjoyment; in short its a small amusement park :D. Since it was a sunday, the place was deserted and we were able to move around freely

This day concluded with the outing at “Eat Street”, one of the most popular hangouts at hyderabad. Eat Street is located on the shore of the lake Hussain Sagar. In the middle of the lake is a huge statue of Buddha. The hyderabad guys told us that this was the largest statue in Asia.

[27th Feb 2006]We reached IDC early today. The Andhra roadtrip began today and it was flagged off by Mr. Srini Koppulu, the big boss of the IDC :). Aarthi was also there with us to flag off the event. The first college we went to was Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTU). The sessions were with the MCA people. They were not too good. In many respects, TN students are way better than Andhra.

The second session was also at the JNTU for the CSE dept. This session was good as the crowd was good. As a matter of fact, the first session was good because, we were able to them lots of things they didn’t know about. I’m sure the interested guys will go back and check the websites we gave them. This was the main purpose of the Community Bandwagon and the roadtrip. Spread the word of community and technology.

We went for a movie at iMax theatres today :D. The movie was Taxi No. 9211 starring Nana Patekar and John Abraham. The movie was good and lasted for 2 hours. We had dinner at iMax itself.

[28th Feb 2006]We visited two more colleges. Since the colleges are far apart, we spent a lot of time travelling. In the evening, we went to Birla Mandir. The temple is a architectural marvel and we took lots of photos there. Will upload some to flickr soon..

We went to Fortune hotel for dinner. It was supposed to be THE star hotel in hyderabad. The dinner was ok.

[1st Mar 2006]I met a geeky genius named Dhaval Bhanushali. He is a very good programmer in C and Core Java. He has extended HigLayout to make it a bug free one. He participated in code4bill and went for the interview. Due to some silly mistakes, he lost it. Nevertheless, he shared his valuable experience with me and gave me lots of websites and tips. He is also a level 7 hacker 😉

A down-to-earth person, there is no hint of pride in him. A Great Soul. Along with him, i met another gem of a person named Mahendar. Both of these guys taught a lot of things i never knew (both tech & non-tech). It was an eye-opening experience today 😀

During the whole travel time today, i was reading Linda Goodman’s Star Signs book. And within few minutes, i was telling each of them what their name and dob meant to them. Since I’m interested in java, they crowned a title called MCJA (Microsoft Certified Java Astrologer)….ha ha ha! Every minute of the tour was exciting.

[2nd March 2006]We went to some more colleges. The response at every college we went was excellent. During the dinner today, an exciting thing called Operation Salt happened. The core persons of this being myself, Chitresh and Gautam. After we were seated at the hotel with Prathiba (it was her treat), we were served water. We took the salt container that was meant for soups and emptied half of it into Chaitu’s glass. A minute later, all the salt got dissolved in it.

We called Chaitu for Cheers! and the minute he drank the water, his face changed colours. It was so funny that we were laughing for the next 15 minutes. Instead of pouring out the water, the glasses were slowly exchanged with that of Prathiba. Now, all the 15 of us “cheers”ed and Prathiba drank the salt water..ha ha ha! This time, the salt jar was empty ! Imagine her surprise when she drank the water that was as salty as sea water !

We left for Vijayawada tonight to visit colleges there.

[3rd March 2006]At Vijayawada also, the response was excellent. Today is one day i won’t forget in my life. After the exciting day, during the dinner; mine was almost over. I was over a cup of ice-cream when someone shouted, “Hey, anna university results have come”. I almost spilled the ice-cream and dashed off to make phone calls. After some frantic tries, i got a reply saying that the results will be out tonight. The night passed sleeplessly, when at 3AM i heard that familiar “keenk- keenk” sound of the mobile. I was sweating despite the A/C in the bus. The mobile almost slipped out of my hand.

Shivering due to both fear and A/C, i opened the “1 Unread Message”. This is what it said, “Machan, yay! we cleared da! u got 83%, let us have a blast in Chennai when u r back..yoo! hoo!”. Yipee! i saved my job. Thank God! I fell asleep immediately.

We were going to bangalore to attend the Academic Days event at PESIT college.

[4th March 2006]Like the Coimbatore one, we reached PESIT directly. The only change being, this time we brushed our teeth. The 16 hrs of travel wore us out completely. The sessions by Yashavant Kanetkar on VC++ programming was tooooooooo good. The event ended with Kevin’s session on “Intro to .net” with Reza and Sharath doing some cool demos.

Myself and deepak left for chennai tonight. The whole tour came to a nice end. I’m looking forward to more of this 😀

March 7th, 2006

Hi! people, i have been hearing that a web browser in VB.NET takes 6 lines of code. How much lines of code do you think it would be in java??

Well, it takes just 3 lines of code. If you come back to me saying that it takes lot of pain to create the necessary GUI then “WTF, download netbeans”. With matisse, netbeans provides a solid foundation for designing GUIs, so that developers like me can forget GridBagLayout and rest in peace. Ok enough of that 😉

1. Open netbeans ide.2. Create a new project. File->New Project. Select “General” and on the right pane, choose “Java Application”.3. Click next. Give the project name as “TwoMinBrowser” and “Finish”.

Your project is ready. Go to java.net and download JDIC (JDesktop Integration Components). It doesn’t come as a part of Java SE 5.0 or J2SE 4.0. Good news is that, it is a part of Mustang (Java SE 6). Unpack the JDIC zip file and you will find a “jdic.jar”.

Click on the Projects tab in the IDE (Window->Projects), expand TwoMinBrowser. Now expand “Libraries” section, right click on it and select “Add JAR/Folder”. Navigate to the “jdic.jar” and add it. The projects tab should be like the image on the left.

Expand “Source Packages”, right click on “twominbrowser” and select “New->JFrame Form”. Give it a name and click “Finish”. From the Palette, drag n drop a JPanel. Resize it to fit the full form. Now add a JTextField (txtUrl), a JButton and JTabbedPane (browPane). The final form should be like the screenshot on the right. Click on the image to see a bigger one.

Double click on the JButton (“Go”) or right click on it and select Events->Action->actionPerformed. Write the following code. Press Alt+Shift+F to resolve unresolved classes. Press F5. Should you get any errors, delete the Main.java from the “Source Packages” node and press F5 again. It should now compile and execute.

Type in a proper url at the textbox and click on “Go”. Our TwoMinBrowser will work. This is the result of display of yahoo page in our browser. The same code will work in linux also.

Change the url and click on “Go” again, you should see a new tab. Thats it, ur tabbed browser is up and running in just 3 lines of code. If you are a netbeans user already, building this will take you only 2 minutes.

March 7th, 2006

Yo! guys n gals, i have been tagged again & this time, by Sunil This time, its different altogether. The rules first,

Rules of the Game1. The tagged victim has to come up with 8 different points of their perfect lover.2. Need to mention the sex of the person.3. Tag 8 (or as many as possible) victims to join this game & leave a comment on their comments saying they’ve been tagged.4. If tagged the 2nd time, there’s no need to post again.

My Target: Female1. Passionate2. Should be more of a friend3. Be a part of every feeling4. Should know cooking (cos i know 😉 )5. Travelling – I love travelling to exotic places6. Should be interested in social service activities7. Ability to withstand shocks (mental toughness)8. Nice at heart and understanding